1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to an apparatus to recognize an illumination environment of a vehicle and a control method thereof, which may allow a current illumination environment of a vehicle to be accurately recognized.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is used a method of recognizing an illumination environment by an illumination sensor to turn a headlight on/off or adjust intensity of the headlight according to the recognized illumination environment.
However, when an illumination environment is recognized by only an illumination sensor in a shaded region of mountains in the daytime or on a cloudy day, the illumination environment may be erroneously recognized as nighttime despite daytime. As a result, headlight control may be unnecessarily performed.
In addition, there is a method of recognizing an illumination environment by capturing a front image using a camera and then analyzing the captured image. In this case, however, an illumination environment of a vehicle may be erroneously recognized because the method relies on the image analysis and may be affected by an object or a background color.
Accordingly, the related art is problematic in that it is difficult to grasp various illumination environments of the vehicle merely by the illumination sensor or the camera.